Books

As an education reporter for the Chicago-Sun Times, Maribeth Vander
Weele has been to the trenches of education reform. Reclaiming Our
Schools: The Struggle for Chicago School Reform is her critique of
one of the most radical reform efforts in the nation: the
decentralization of Chicago's schools. Through the voices and
experiences of individuals she interviewed for her articles, Ms. Vander
Weele traces the decline of the city's schools and the ensuing battle
to resurrect them. Her findings would be discouraging if not for the
determination of some citizens to improve the school system. These
front-line heroes are a cause for hope in this disturbing tale of
corruption and politics. (Loyola University Press, $12.95).

The multicultural movement has "slipped from its moorings and turned
into a new petrified opinion of the sort it was supposed to transcend,"
the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein contends in
Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for
America's Future,. Once intended to educate and enlighten society,
the multicultural movement, he believes, now intimidates people and
restricts democratic discourse. This trend threatens to pull society
apart in a slow political tug of war which, his book demonstrates, has
already begun in the nation's classrooms and other venues. At stake,
Mr. Bernstein asserts, are truth and justice for those who truly need
it. (Knopf, $25.00).

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a Harvard University professor of education
whose heritage is African-American, learned early in life that
education was not confined to the classroom. Animated discussions with
family and friends around the Lawrences' dining-room table supplemented
the teachings of her predominantly white school and sowed the seeds of
inquiry that would later flower into her newest book, I've Known
Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation. In it, the self-styled "human
archaeologist" gently excavates the lives of six successful
African-Americans, weaving their tales of achievement and loss into a
richly layered portrait of black society. It is an image, she believes,
that adds important balance and depth to our perception of
African-Americans. (Addison Wesley, $25.00).

Twenty-six people died in a 1988 school-bus crash in Kentucky. They
didn't die from the impact; they were burned to death. The journalist
James S. Kunen has chronicled the legal battle of two families to prove
that even their most ardent prayers and the most careful vehicle
maintenance could not have altered the fate of their loved ones. Two
design factors proved fatal: the bus's exposed fuel tank and the highly
flammable polyurethane seat covers. Reckless Disregard: Corporate
Greed, Government Indifference, and the Kentucky School Bus Crash
replays the sadly ironic events of the crash and exposes the corporate
lobbying and lax government regulations that made it possible for the
bus defects to go uncorrected. It also pays tribute to the dead and
issues a warning to the living: If school-bus design flaws remain
unchanged, there may be tragic sequels to this story. (Simon &
Schuster, $23.00).

Buried among the widely cited studies showing gender-based
inequities in education are very real young women with stories to tell.
But who they are and why they flounder in the Sargasso Sea of
adolescence are questions often obscured by the statistics. In
School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, the
journalist Peggy Orenstein attaches faces, names, and personalities to
the numbers. She spent a year at two middle schools in California
listening to girls talk about their education, their fears, and their
ambitions. With her book, Ms. Orenstein invites the reader to hear
these young women, understand them, and help them retain their
intellectual curiosity and confidence as they travel toward adulthood.
(Doubleday, $23.50).

In the not-too-distant past, school worries that went beyond grades
and normal growing pains were confined to such problems as bullies,
head lice, and acne. Now, students must confront drugs, gangs, and
guns. In a timely wake-up call to educators and policymakers, the
child-care expert Joy G. Dryfoos urges the creation of schools that can
care for the whole child in these expanded social contexts.
Full-Service Schools: A Revolution in Health and Social Services for
Children, Youth, and Families charts the "emerging phenomenon" of
full-service schools, linking these modern-day manifestations to their
precursors, settlement houses. In the first book of its kind, Ms.
Dryfoos outlines why children's health, social, and educational
services need to be integrated to contend with these "new morbidities."
She highlights schools that have successfully made these connections
and provides a valuable resource for people working in this field.
(Jossey Bass, $25.00).

Like an anthropologist studying another culture, Tony Wagner
immersed himself for several years in the daily activities of three
Boston-area schools. He wanted to learn why many schools have remained
relatively unchanged in the decade since A Nation at Risk. The
ingredients necessary for constructive change, he discovered, were not
exotic. They were pretty basic: clear academic goals, core values, and
collaboration between teachers, students, parents, and community
members. How Schools Change: Lessons from Three Communities
details the ongoing efforts of three very different communities to
improve their children's education. By sharing these examples, Mr.
Wagner, currently president of the Institute for Responsive Education,
says he hopes to provide a blueprint for other schools in the throes of
reform. (Beacon, $25.00).

Education may begin in the classroom, but it does not necessarily
end there. In Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way, the
anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (whose mother was the towering
figure in that field, Margaret Mead) asserts her own definition of
learning and education, challenging the classroom as the primary arena
for these processes. Life and its myriad experiences provide the
natural catalysts for inquiry, she says, calling this approach to life
"peripheral vision." The individual's response to different events and
peoples, she explains, is what constitutes real education. Drawing on
her own life as a respected academic and the daughter of a famous
mother, she broadens the definition of education, recasting it as a
gift to be accepted, rather than as a burden to be undertaken. (Harper
Collins, $23.00).

--Megan Drennan

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